Dying ignored & the Indifference of a broken race.

This has been my argument for nearly 30 years. Ever since the day I was forced by my mother, to not intervene. The human race is lost.

My mother and I were walking late at night…2am, fleeing the abusive boyfriend. She had us walk 2 miles to a family friends house because she had no car without him. I was actually quite excited to be up, and outside in the fresh night air (as we have since learned I have a strong affinity with), on a school night. We stopped by a surprisingly busy 7-11 because mom needed cigarettes. Outside there was a drunk homeless lying on his back, choking on throwup, dying. Everybody stood back, passed by, some watched. Did nothing. I kept saying to mom “We have to help!” and her reply was “don’t get involved, don’t get involved, let’s just go”. I tried to go to him but she was physically pulling me away, holding me. I understand that she believed she was protecting her 10 year old (?) daughter. But instead, that moment caused my irreparable harm. By the time we had gotten only a little ways away the man had stopped moving. Completely. Such complete stillness in what was before a living being I had never seen. Watching that man die in a busy parking lot full of people who not one of them…not one…would simply go over and turn the drunk over, or call the police…no one, caused such great harm to me. No one cared enough about their fellow living being to overcome their own personal aversions. “Christian nation” my ass. Most people have let centuries of false prophet’tering fill them with so much fear and hate they no longer have any concept whatsoever of what it is to simply be a good human being. The deadliest, most evil trait in Mankind is indifference. ‘Don’t get involved, move along’. That day I made a vow to never, ever, be like that. I will not allow myself the comfort of walking away when someone is seriously and obvious in need. I don’t care if I’m late to work, having a bad day, in an unfamiliar place – these things do not compare to the value of a life, or the value of my soul in peace knowing I did what I could. I understand this means I might die horribly intervening. But to do anything other is more wrong, and I wish people understood that. I really do. How can anything at all ever get better, with everyone walking away when they need to stay?

I felt a similar disgust one day in Portland, Oregon. There we all, the hundred strangers and I, spent an hour together at the bus mall downtown five days a week waiting. There were various regular homeless people around. They seemed nice enough to me. Gave them what I could, talked with them. I’ll never regard a homeless person with anything less that what I regard you with. All beings deserve basic, common respect. I live perpetually on the edge of homeless myself and even if that happens I will demand the basic respect I give. It is simply the right way to be, regardless of situation. Then one morning there were police by the homeless hub – the bank building across the street from the bus mall. One of the men had died there, homeless in the street, soaked in his own piss. What angered me was the reaction of the regulars around me – *suddenly* they were all concerned for the man, so so many of them saying they had NEVER seen him before “who was he?”. There was DRAMA now, it was socially acceptable to take an interest now, so the crowd grew a heart. A heart that wasn’t there in any previous day – I was furious. I ended up reaming someone out saying “YOU SEE THIS MAN EVERY DAY DON’T ACT LIKE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN HIM BEFORE IN YOUR LIFE!!!”. I was so mad. We all saw that man every day. No one would interact. Take an interest. Now that he’s dead? Oh he’s suddenly *a human being*. Now we can care and be concerned that he was homeless. Now it’s sad instead of pathetic and deserved. The sheer self-absorption of people in their own every day, to the detriment of those around them, just wounds me in some way.

Don’t misunderstand and think I’m saying everybody has to go out of their way, every day, use all their own days to help another. No. All I ask is people to at least care. And that’s what fails. People don’t even give a shit until it’s socially acceptable to. Indifference is King.

NEW YORK – The homeless man lay face down, unmoving, on the sidewalk outside an apartment building, blood from knife wounds pooling underneath his body.

One person passed by in the early morning. Then another, and another. Video footage from a surveillance camera shows at least seven people going by, some turning their heads to look, others stopping to gawk. One even lifted the homeless man’s body, exposing what appeared to be blood on the sidewalk underneath him, before walking away.

It wasn’t until after the 31-year-old Guatemalan immigrant had been lying there for nearly an hour that emergency workers arrived, and by then, it was too late. Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax — who police said was stabbed while intervening to help a woman being attacked — had died.

“I think it’s horrific,” said Marla Cohan, who teaches at P.S. 82, a school across the street from where Tale-Yax died. “I think people are just afraid to step in; they don’t want to get involved; who knows what their reasons are?”

Tale-Yax was walking behind a man and a woman on 144th Street in the Jamaica section of Queens around 6 a.m. April 18 when the couple got into a fight that became physical, according to police, who pieced together what happened from surveillance footage and interviews with area residents.

Tale-Yax was stabbed several times when he intervened to help the woman, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. She and the other man fled in different directions, and Tale-Yax pursued the man before collapsing. Authorities are searching for the man and woman.

A 911 call of a woman screaming came in around 6 a.m., but when officers responded to the address that was given, no one was there, police said. Another call came in around 7 a.m., saying a man was lying on the street, but gave the wrong address. Finally, around 7:20 a.m., someone called 911 to report a man had possibly been stabbed at 144th Street and 88th Road.

Police and firefighters arrived a few minutes later to find Tale-Yax dead. Officials say they’re not sure whether the man was still alive when passers-by opted not to help him.

Residents who regularly pass by the same stretch of sidewalk, in a working-class neighborhood of low-rise apartment buildings and fast food restaurants near a busy boulevard, were unnerved by the way Tale-Yax died.

“Is anybody human anymore?” asked Raechelle Groce, visiting her grandmother at a nearby building on Monday. “What’s wrong with humanity?”

In the urban environment, it’s not unusual to see people on the street, sleeping or under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

But even assuming the person they’ve just passed is drunk, instead of injured, is no reason not to notify authorities, said Seth Herman, another teacher at the school. He remembered calling an ambulance when seeing a man who appeared to be homeless on the street, with a beer bottle near by.

He called 911, he said, because “I felt it wasn’t my job to figure out if the person was drunk or actually hurt.”